auto repair invoicing

As you can imagine, we asked the same questions quite often, so we have began compiling an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page to address some of the most common concerns and issues raised from new and existing customers. We will be updating this with time and relevancy as our software continues to grow in scope and complexity.

We would also like to remind our users that our youtube channel has many useful instructional videos as well as a walk-through tour.

Our customer support team are always just an email away for any new and existing customers who may need assistance in becoming familiar with our software.

One of top user requests has been for QuickBooks support, and we have been beavering away getting this in place since the new year.

We are happy to say that we now have a functional implementation with QuickBooks Online in place now, still in ‘sandbox’ development, you may have seen QuickBooks appear and disappear in parts of the UI in the past few weeks, this is just a peak of what is yet to come.

Currently, when activated, all new invoices and clients will be exported into QuickBooks.

For existing users, there exists an ability to export all your Auto Repair Bill customers and invoices to QuickBooks Online.

New users can import all there customers from QuickBooks online into Auto Repair Bill.

Our integration will need to be reviewed and approved by QuickBooks before we can make this feature can go live on our app.

Speed is everything when a customer is waiting, and we are moving our app to a new blazing fast server based in Michigan, USA. As an Irish based company we had so far enjoyed giving our business to local hosting providers. To better serve our US customer base, we are relocating our primary servers to a data center located in Michigan.

Our new US data center will see massive speed improvements, we have invested in more CPU power and RAM, as well as increased bandwidth. All this translates to our auto repair software having super fast page loading and PDF generation.

This will benefit our users in USA and Canada the most, but users worldwide will see massive speed increases also due a co-located server solution.

QuickBooks support is another highly requested feature, and we are finally getting around to implementing a seamless solution for our auto repair software.

Initial support is planned for QuickBooks Online, and be fully integrated with any action you take on Auto Repair Bill that needs to be uploaded and recorded. We may add support for the Windows QuickBooks version in the future, if there is a demand for this. Please do get in touch if you are a user interested in using with Windows version.

We expect to have this online in a few weeks, as always stay tuned and watch this space!

We are taking on board the combined requests of our customers over the last few months to develop new and more flexible invoice templates. For users that are happy with the way things are, there will be no change. For those who want more options, we will be adding a second, and possibly more invoice templates in the coming days.

In the meantime, this is what we have so far, but we are still tweaking!

Auto Repair Invoice

Any feedback that our customers would like to share, would be very much appreciated, you can leave any suggestions in the comments on this post please.

This has been another common request from users of our auto repair software to be able to update the mileage and last service date on a vehicle at the time of creating an invoice.

This can now be easily done, on the create invoice screen, there is now a link to show options to update mileage and last service, the service date will default to the current date, but can be easily changed to the date you need.

Previously this could only be updated by going into the client dashboard and updating details from here, we hope this will streamline and make updating these details more efficiently by offering the feature to update these details at time of invoice creation.

Please note that this new feature, along with several others currently under final testing, will be released in free upgrade to all customers this Thurday 15/10/15.

As always, keep those suggestions coming, and thank you for those who have made requests.

Over the course of time it had been pointed out to us here that many US states do not allow tax on labor part of work carried out. This has been perplexing to many new users, often concerned about applying zero tax to labor and adding tax rates for parts only. This has been another common request for our auto repair software.

Up until now, this involved setting one of the tax brackets to zero and applying that to the labor cost.

We have improved and simplified upon this by adding the option of ‘NONE’ for tax on labor, and if you do you need to apply tax to labor, the other tax brackets you set in Settings will also still be available.

We hope this clears some confusion and makes labor costing on invoices easier for those in states that do not have tax on labor.

This update will take effect on your next upgrade patch this Thursday, 15/10/15.

We have been quietly working on some major upgrades in the shadows, and are now almost ready to release the fruits of our efforts!

Labor Rates

Firstly, many of you had asked about labor rates and time costing in the past. We are happy to announce that this has been addressed now. You can enter your invoice time as either time or cash value for your labor, similarly when creating Repair Orders, you can enter labor in hours and automatically calculate labor cost.

For labor cost calculations to function you must enter your labor rate in Settings, you can also conveniently look up the local labor rate in your area by ZIP code.

QUIK Service

Creating a QUIK Service is a breeze. Basically, you go about creating an RO or Invoice as per normal. Given that the vehicle VIN is supplied, then you see a list of service items, and can refine by mileage and time since last service. This is a massively time saving function, please see the video above for a demonstration of QUIK Service in our auto repair software.

Pick the service items you wish to add to RO or Invoice, and viola, a fully created, costed and calculated document is produced in seconds!

You can create an invoice using the QUIK service in a very similar fashion as to creating an RO using QUIK Service.

These new updates are expected to be released later this week, so as ever, stay tuned and watch this space.